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In Search of a Definition of Failed Higher Education

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Universities once helped humanity move beyond the rule of divine authority. Today, universities must help people learn not to become slaves to their own instincts. When do we know that a system of higher education has succeeded? We often answer this question through familiar measures: graduation rates, grades, employment rates, salaries, university rankings, research publications, or how well graduates meet the needs of the labor market. These indicators are useful. They tell us something about whether an institution is functioning effectively. But they do not answer the deeper question. What kind of human being does higher education produce? A university may produce graduates with excellent academic records, impressive technical skills, and highly competitive salaries. Yet if those graduates cannot govern their own desires, cannot use power responsibly, cannot distinguish between having something and being someone, and cannot continue learning when the world changes, can we really say...
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MIT’s New Position on AI in Education: A Framework for the 2027 Academic Year

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  MIT is late to the conversation, but at least we finally have the conversation in writing. ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. Since then, generative AI has moved from an experimental technology to an everyday presence in education. Students use it to write code, explain difficult concepts, summarize readings, search for information, brainstorm ideas, and work through increasingly complex projects. Nearly four years later, MIT has now articulated a comprehensive institutional position on how generative AI should be approached in teaching, learning, and research training. That may feel late. But it is also important. Rather than treating GenAI simply as a cheating problem, MIT’s framework asks a much more fundamental question: What should education look like when machines can increasingly perform many of the tasks we traditionally use to measure learning? The answer is not to ban AI, nor to surrender education to it. Instead, MIT proposes a set of principles that put learning, ...
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Three Modes of Knowledge Transmission on the Lectern: An Educational Leadership Perspective

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  The faculty hiring season for the new academic year has just come to an end, as we prepare for the fall semester. After many cycles of opening and closing semesters, and after watching people step up to and step down from university lecterns, I have gradually come to recognize something interesting: people can stand in the same classroom, teach the same subject, and even use the same textbook, yet they may not be talking to their students about the same thing called “knowledge.” The difference does not simply lie in the degree hanging on the wall, the title on a business card, or the number of years of experience listed on a résumé. It lies deeper—in the way a person develops understanding, draws upon experience, engages with theory, and ultimately questions what they themselves already know. If we look at education from this perspective, I often see three approaches to knowledge emerging from the lectern. They are not three fixed types of people, nor are they three steps on a...
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Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is Great: If You Want to Enter the Modern Future World and Grasp Postcolonial Concepts, This Is the Series to Watch

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Just released, season two of the One Hundred Years of Solitude series on Netflix demonstrates an increasingly confident effort to adapt Gabriel García Márquez's classic novel. While the first season primarily introduced viewers to the mythical world of the Buendía family and the town of Macondo, the second season significantly broadens the story's scope. Macondo is no longer a relatively isolated community; instead, it begins to be swept up in economic and political forces far beyond its residents' control. Railroads arrive, the banana company expands its operations, labor is organized under new logic, and alongside these changes comes a social order increasingly influenced by external capital. What is notable is that the film does not turn this process into a simple narrative about "progress" or "invasion." The railroad serves both as a symbol of modernization and as a doorway through which new power relations enter Macondo. The banana company brings c...
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War and Peace: The 365-Day Diary of Tears and Blood of the American Consumer

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Human history has witnessed many brutal conflicts: the 100 Years War, the Crusades, or the classic showdown between cat and mouse in cartoons. And yet, all of those events must humbly tip their hats to a far more modern, ruthless, and tear filled form of warfare that unfolds every single day on American soil. This is the chronicle of the consumer’s 365 day hunt for sales , a battlefield where the scramble for discounted goods exposes the material excess of the 21st century , stripping away the glossy mask to reveal a form of comedy so tragic it hurts. To understand the ferocity and absurdity of this daily war, consider this haunting dispatch from the front lines. Diary of a warrior “ 2 a.m. I just placed an order for an infrared foot massager for my Golden Retriever. I do not own a dog. But it was 60% off . I could not let my neighbor get it first!” Material excess begins to reveal itself in exactly such delirious moments, when people do not buy things because they need them, but beca...
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What is Measurement in Science and Art?

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  After graduating as an illustrious advanced student from Minh Đức Middle School, nestled right in the heart of the notorious Cầu Muối wet market, I pocketed a mountain of confidence regarding my scientific acumen that lasted all the way until retirement. That profound middle-school knowledge base, combined with a healthy dose of street smarts, became my ultimate weapon. It kept me perpetually locked and loaded to grill leading doctors and professors whenever they strayed outside their lane and made extracurricular professional assertions. Just picture an orthopedic specialist holding forth eloquently about... the urinary system, before seamlessly pivoting to commentary on macroeconomic geopolitics. In those moments, I never flinched. I simply deployed a single, ultimate trick to bring those great minds back down to earth: I asked them to quantify and prove it with numbers. Because, whether you are out in the Cầu Muối Market or deep inside a laboratory, there is an immutable truth...
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The First Trillionaire Has Arrived: Welcome to the Post-Scarcity Age

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June 12, 2026 marks a historic turning point in human civilization: the emergence of humanity’s first trillionaire. The event immediately sent shockwaves across the globe, conjuring dystopian visions of extreme inequality in which the planet’s greatest resources are concentrated in the hands of a single individual. To appreciate the full historical depth of this milestone, let us push our imagination slightly further into the future: what would happen if this trend continued and the world eventually contained one hundred trillionaires controlling the entirety of technological resources? At first glance, a hundred individuals possessing all wealth resembles a superlative inferno on Earth. Yet, through the lens of phenomenology and existential projection, this absolute concentration of capital conceals a grand paradox. By optimizing automation and artificial intelligence to govern planetary systems with perfect efficiency, this elite inadvertently activates a mechanism that abolishes mat...
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A Travelogue from Paulo Freire’s Birthplace

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I am sitting here catching the Atlantic sea breeze in Recife, the hometown of Paulo Freire. Everyone nods in agreement when calling him the "founding father" of sociology and education, but there’s a sensational fact that not everyone remembers: his greatest masterpiece was once blacklisted as a banned book across all kinds of political regimes globally. He himself was imprisoned and then forced to pack his bags into exile. The reason? Because he dared to instigate people to think for themselves and stop obediently submitting! The scenery in Recife today is gorgeous, the breeze is refreshing, and I'm holding a sweet and sour caipirinha cocktail. Yet, scrolling online and reading speeches from "experts" and educational research institutes whose only big feature is their storefront signage almost made me choke on my drink. Traveling through the underworld of professional writers, there’s an unwritten rule: If you want to shoot the breeze about society, power, or t...
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The Biological Nature of Learning

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Before we dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning models, or the complexities of modern educational systems, we must ground ourselves in a more primal reality. We often treat "learning" as a purely intellectual or digital endeavor, but in its truest form, it is a visceral, biological phenomenon. To understand how we can teach a child or train a neural network, we first have to understand the wetware between our ears, the trillions of connections that physically rewire themselves every time we encounter a new idea. Without this biological transformation, education is just noise, and AI is just code. Behavior Change as a Learning Outcome Imagine for a moment that you have just spent three thousand dollars on a weekend seminar titled "Mastering Emotional Zen." You walked out of that hotel ballroom with a glossy binder, a designer tote bag, and a profound sense of inner peace. You feel enlightened. You feel like a brand new person. But ten minut...
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